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Tag Archives: Corel Paint Shop Pro X3

When I first started doing digital scrapbooking, I didn’t want to make an investment in software because I didn’t know if it was something I was going to do a lot of. My husband found me a free program called Paint.net. It is a neat little program that is basically built by the users. I could do all the basic stuff, but it didn’t have any really fancy tools. Things like adding a drop shadow would take 6 or 7 clicks whereas in a bought program you do it in two clicks. After a year or so of using Paint.net, I decided that digital scrapbooking was something that I really enjoyed and was going to continue as a hobby. Most digital scrapbookers at the time were using Adobe products (this was before the big boom of software specific for digital scrapbooking), but I decided to go with the equivalent product from Corel, as Corel is a Canadian company. I figured I would be able to muddle my way through as I had with Paint.net. I have managed, but I almost always have to “translate” adobe tutorials into paint shop language on my own. I have decided to post paint shop tutorials here in case there is anyone else out there doing digital scrapbooking in paint shop 🙂

The first tutorial I have decided to do, is adding a touch of colour to a black and white photo. I love this effect, but I find it only works on very select photos. I don’t end up using it often, so I can never remember how to do it! There are lots of tutorials for Adobe on how to do this, but I think at least half of them are not great ways. Some of the tutorials basically put a black and white copy above a colour copy of the photo. You then erase what you want in colour from the black and white copy. The problem is, that if you erase just a smidge too much, the only way to correct is your undo button. The way I’m going to show you gives you the option of re-painting to black and white.

So here goes:

Open your photo and Save As so that you don’t accidentally lose your original photo.

In your layers pallet, right click on the layer called copy of background. Select New Mask Layer -> Show All.

Make sure that black is selected as your foreground colour and white is selected as your background colour. The easiest way to do this is to have your Materials Pallet open (refer to step 2 on how to open pallets) and select the “set to black and white” button.

Now you can start to paint. Anything that you paint using a black paint brush will reveal the colour from the original image. Anything that you paint using a white paint brush will change back to black and white. Here is my finished product:

This is how I put it into a layout using The Scrappy Kat’s kit Totally Flakey: